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It’s not so much a lost love, C.J. muses, as a missed connection.
She’s usually not one for such cliches. Categorizing relationships have never been her forte, though, so it’s probably acceptable to resort to cliches to do so.
Life is good, now, for the most part. She has Danny in her bed most nights (or perhaps he has her in his, she’s never sure), and the promise of unemployment on the horizon is enough to keep her going through the workday. She has Kate to gossip with and Margaret and Charlie to share her work burdens, and she has the bitterly cold beauty of Washington in winter.
Life is good, yes. But C.J.’s eyes follow tweed-clad elbows on busy sidewalks. She steps into Will’s office and is thrown by the sound of soft orchestral music instead of rhythmic plunks of rubber against the wall. When she’s kissing Danny, she sometimes imagines that his beard is a little bit more and his hair a little bit less than it actually is.
It’s not that she wishes it was him in her bed instead of Danny. It would’ve never worked, she and Toby. They’d tried, once, in the 80s, a disastrous attempt at what was less a relationship than an assortment of lunch dates and decent fucks wearing a trench coat.
But still. She’s standing on the stoop of Toby’s walk-up, and staring at the door like it’s a foreign policy memo she doesn’t want to read. And she’s here purely for business reasons, hasn’t spoken to him for anything other than business reasons in two months, but she’s staring at the door and wondering what it would be like to have her own key, to let herself in after every long White House day.
Toby would kiss her cheek, in that detached, formal way he has. She’d bring his face up to hers and kiss him on the lips, deep and slow, in greeting. They’d have a few drinks—beer for her, scotch for him—and retire to bed. They’d probably have sex. Whether they did or not, they’d sit up in bed and read like an old married couple, all dim light and reading glasses and domesticity.
She knows exactly what it would be like. She used to do this routine every night. And then they were on opposite sides of the coast and it couldn’t happen and then they were coworkers and it couldn’t happen and then they were in the White House and it definitely couldn’t happen, and somehow along the way C.J. and Toby have missed the boat that she somehow always expected to dock.
But it doesn’t matter now. It’s not the end of the workday, and this is not her home, and Toby is not her lover. It’s late on a Wednesday afternoon and C.J. really has to finish this within the hour. She knocks on the door, raps it sharply three times, and half-expects Toby to slam it in her face when she sees the hurt surprise in his eyes. He doesn’t, though.
C.J.’s always thought Toby’s eyes were puppylike. He looks at her like a mournful, balding beagle, the most casual (and most attractive) she’s seen him in years, and she wonders how his bedroom is decorated now. She pours herself a drink and wonders why she and Toby never gave it another go. Then he opens his mouth, and she remembers.
It’s amazing, the things time and distance will make you forget. For example, she forgot this unbridled, prickly stubbornness. The protesters and columnists had somehow talked her into believing his uncompromising moralism was honorable, but C.J.’s starting to think he’s really just a self-righteous old bastard after all. What kind of self-aggrandizing, masochistic man would take six years in jail that could be spent raising his kids? Is that what they call moralism these days?
He’s yelling at her and she’s yelling right back and she’s so angry she could spit but she can’t stop wondering what it would be like to step-parent twin toddlers. They’re arguing in his kitchen and in the back part of her mind, she imagines shushing him, arguing in hushed voices because the kids are upstairs, smiling and making nice when Molly comes down for a glass of water and continuing the argument as soon as she’s in bed again. It doesn’t matter because they’re arguing about pardons and not parenting, but C.J. thinks it would have been wonderful, raising the twins with Toby.
It takes less than 20 minutes for her to leave his apartment. Rather, she is kicked out. They yell some more and then Toby forcefully suggests her departure, and C.J. knows whatever strange fantasy she’s living out right now is coming to a close. She checks her watch and realizes that she now has 43 free minutes.
She calls Danny. She takes a cab and finds a bench a couple blocks down on Pennsylvania Avenue and talks to him for the remaining 27 minutes she has before the next thing Margaret has on the schedule, and she laughs and finds herself looking forward to coming home and seeing him on the couch. Before bed, she'll ask him what he's working on and they’ll continue the small talk they’re having now.
And when a man who’s sort of bookish and sort of prickly and sort of Washington passes by as she laughs at something Danny says, she doesn’t think about Toby. She doesn’t think about Toby at all.